misc.
advice,
links,
books, and more!
novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."
- Terence McKenna
misc.
advice,
links,
books, and more!
novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
March 1. Today, some scary hard crash links: An update on the methane time bomb, the feedback loop where methane warms the atmosphere, which thaws and releases more methane.
An analysis of solar storms. Inevitably there will be a storm as big as the ones in 1921 and 1859, and it will burn out most communication satellites and bring down some electric grids (assuming they haven't already gone down for other reasons).
And from last week, a Reddit IAmA by a guy who lived through the 1992 L.A. Riots. We really need to stop using the word "riot" and be more precise. I was in the so-called "riots" in 1999 in Seattle, and I never felt even slightly unsafe. It was like a big street party.
The difference was in the character of the lawbreakers, and also the stories they told. Whether or not you agree that corporations are evil, you have to admit that someone who tells that story is going to be breaking windows and not breaking heads. The dangerous story is that a certain category of people are evil. And the greatest danger is when that story is told not by the lawbreakers, but by the rulers.
February 28. Rain of fish in Australia (thanks Larry). This kind of thing has happened many times, and Charles Fort covered it in 1919 in The Book of the Damned, chapter 7. He points out that if falling creatures or objects were sucked up in tornadoes, they would be sorted and distributed by weight, not by species; that small frogs have fallen but never large frogs or tadpoles; and that the tornado explanation is never backed up by any observation of a tornado. Notice how narrow-minded we are: a statement that closes doors -- "it must have been a tornado" -- requires no evidence at all, while a statement that opens doors -- "our present model of reality cannot explain this" -- requires such a massive amount of evidence that the same anomalies can be swept under the rug decade after decade.
If you want to read Fort, the key is the first chapter of his first book, where he scorns all our explanations and definitions and categories and laws, comparing them to drawing a circle in the sea. So when he offers his own explanations, like the planet Genesistrine or the Super-Sargasso Sea, he's mostly joking.
February 27. So I'm following the earthquake and tsunami, and I'm not surprised to find that the TV news treats viewers like sheep. It occurs to me that there are at least two directions that any information source can take. One is: "You are powerless, but the experts and authorities are benevolent, competent, and in control, and they will help you and tell you what to do." The other is: "You are a trusted participant in power, so we will give you the best information we have, and you can figure out what to do with it."
February 26. Dmitry Orlov has some more good posts up. The other day he wrote about how difficult it will be to switch our manufacturing over to high-quality items that will be reliable for decades, and why it will probably be done by low-budget garage industry. Also he is publishing a new book, titled Hold Your Applause because America has not quite yet experienced a Soviet-style collapse. And below that, he examines the permanently unemployed as a new and growing consumer class.
There's been a lot of buzz about the Bloom Energy fuel cell. I've been waiting for a concise article cutting through the hype, and that link goes to the first one I've seen. Also note that a fuel cell requires fuel. It's not a source of energy, just a way to turn energy from one form into another.
And a reader sends this 1906 San Francisco streetcar video, taken just four days before the earthquake. This goes back to the subject of saving information for the future: the most valuable thing you can save is a glimpse of what it's like to live in another world, and therefore, what other worlds are possible. In the video, notice how everybody moves. Occasionally someone will speed up to get out of the way of a vehicle, or run playfully, but nobody is rushing, nobody is stressed out, and despite the high density, nobody is stuck in traffic. It's just smooth, friendly chaos.
February 25. New landblog post with cool photos of fire.
February 25. David over at Edge of Grace has been doing some great blogging, with nine posts in the last month.
Thoughtful Cryptogon piece, The Future Where Soda Cans Have Screens, about scary ways that computers are seducing us farther and farther from reality.
And after a comment from Robert, I've changed the bit I wrote the other day about scavenging, to let business owners off the hook and blame cops instead. Here's the new sentence:
Will they know that people went to jail for taking food out of the garbage, because the authorities were envious of people living outside the waste economy, but could not admit it consciously?
February 24. I'm done with the preserving-information subject. Yesterday's post has been edited down a bit and archived at the bottom of the original permalink.
Here's something loosely related. Erik sends this nice article on the Garden of Eden excavation in Turkey. Basically, ancient people had a sophisticated society with stone monuments, before they invented grain agriculture and ruined everything.
Loosely related to that, Lauren sends this article on an ancient birth control herb called silphium, which was harvested to extinction before anyone could figure out how to cultivate it.
February 23. Got a bunch of emails on preserving information, and it's more complex than I originally thought. What I failed to define, for you or even for myself, was what kind of information we would save, or should save. Every kind of information is a different topic.
The most overrated category is how-to-do-it information. Anne points out that the best way to preserve knowledge of how to do things, or maybe the only way, is to make it part of a living culture. Others suggest that our how-to-do-it information might just be harmful, since we've nearly destroyed the world with it. And since we're talking about thousands of years, and not ten years, there's really no point in telling people how to grow squash or tan hides.
Another category is history. On the broad scale, it will be obvious to everyone that we mined all the metal and built giant steel-framed buildings. But what about medium-scale history, the stuff historians write about? If we find it helpful to read Herodotus, people of the future will want to know the same kind of thing about us.
What I find most interesting is human-scale history. If you imagine going back in a time machine, what exactly is exciting about it? Most of us are not looking for the technical details of Damascus steel. We're wondering what it's like to live in a different time. And if you could go thousands of years in the future, what would you want to talk about? And what would they ask you about?
Diane points out that everyone will know how wasteful we were by digging up our landfills. But will they know how we felt about it? Will they see us wallowing in hedonistic pleasure, or will they know how many of us were depressed? Will they know that people went to jail for taking food out of the garbage, because the authorities were envious of people living outside the waste economy, but could not admit it consciously? Will they guess that at the all-time peak of energy consumption and individualism, so many of us felt individually powerless?
Will they know what made us happy? That's too big of a subject! But I can't think of anything there that's easy to send into the future.
February 22. Links related to the below: the Long Now Foundation, and an article by one of them about about Avoiding a Digital Dark Age. It covers the issues of preservation and comprehensibility, but not the issue of low-quality information burying the good stuff.
Also, the Long Now people seem to be mostly techies who are much too optimistic about the survival of the present system. For example, their best idea is the amazing Rosetta Disk, 13,000 pages of text and images, micro-etched into a small piece of metal, and readable after 2000 years with just a few lenses. The article says, "Perhaps it is better thought of as a cautionary example of what our future might look like if we are not able to make the digital world in which we find ourselves remain successful over time." I think of it as something we should be mass-producing, making thousands of copies each of thousands of versions, and storing them in caves.
Then again, maybe it would be more fun for our descendants to do their own thinking and creating instead of following ours.
February 22. (permalink)
I've been thinking more about why exactly I don't save everything I post, and why even my favorite posts get edited down for archiving. It's not to save myself work, because it would be less work to just keep everything. And it's not because I don't care about preservation. It's because I care more about preservation, and I understand that preservation is not a function of storage space, but a function of human attention.
How much storage space do you have for physical stuff? A few closets? Maybe a big house? What if you had a magical extra-dimensional space, on the outside as small as a closet, and on the inside as big as a warehouse? And what if almost all physical items were dirt cheap or even free? Suppose you also had a genie who could instantly store and retrieve anything you put in there. Then how much stuff would you have? Maybe you would fill the warehouse and get another storage unit the size of a jet airplane hangar.
And then what would happen when you died? The genie can store and retrieve but it cannot judge quality or usefulness. Who's going to sort through it all? What if your heirs have their own magic warehouses, and they have the option to fold yours up and throw it in the trash? And then what happens when they die? Also, what if the lifespan of genies is only 10-20 years, and the new generation can't recognize the stuff stored by the old?
Obviously, I'm talking about the way we treat information. I know someone who works in the field of information archiving and retrieval, and she says we are now living in a lost age: when historians look back at our time, they will have no idea what happened. The ancient Maya carved their records in stone. Medieval scholars wrote on vellum, which can easily last 1000 years. How long does a CD last, or a flash drive? And who will be able to read it? After only 20 years, with no tech crash, it's already very difficult to recover data from 5¼ inch floppies. Even our books are almost always written on self-consuming acidic paper. And there is little or no effort to sort out what's most important. According to my source, book-archiving warehouses file them by size and date of arrival.
What if you took a handful of diamonds, scattered them in a massive pile of gravel, mixed it all up, and then took a few handfuls out? What are the odds you would get a diamond back? What if the diamonds were disguised as gravel and could only be identified by close examination? What if the whole pile gradually disappeared? This is what we're doing with our information.
To preserve our story, we need to do three things: 1) practice sorting information and editing it down to the very best stuff; 2) put it in a form that will be readable in the remote future; 3) if possible, build a human tradition of keeping track of the archives. I'm also wondering if there's any way to store music for thousands of years. Turntable records made of titanium?
February 21. Adam comments that it's frustrating to link to my blog from his blog, because I don't have permalinks, and he suggests some new software called Jekyll that can generate a web 2.0 site from static html.
I liked web 1.0 better, back before the ads started to move and talk, when you could still get around with dial-up, when people went online for information and still looked for community in the physical world. And I'm really more interested in web 0.0 -- using the internet, as long as it lasts, to prepare for a world without an internet. So even if someone made a mirror of this site, and turned every post into a permanent file with comments, I wouldn't go there myself.
But I can make one concession for permalinks. First, every post that I've ever archived already has a permalink. You can find it by doing view source on the archive page and reading the name in the (a name="") tag at the top of the post. Then the link is the archive URL, a number sign, and the name. For example, here's the permalink to my January 13 post about the book Gaiome: http://ranprieur.com/archives/028.html#gaiome. So, from now on, when I make a post that I don't think would be a waste of time to link to, I'll pre-archive it immediately and post a permalink.
February 20. Updated post: Thanks Aaron for doing some research on Jeremy Rifkin. Here's a loooong transcript of a talk he gave back in 1991, An afternoon with Jeremy Rifkin. I've read the whole thing now, and it's a wide-ranging critique of the mythology and culture of the industrial age, including stuff about the enclosure movement, cartesian metaphysics, economic growth, and utilitarianism. There's also some stuff I haven't seen before, like analyses of sight vs smell, digital vs analog watches, and "hot evil" vs "cold evil", and a really astute observation of how we use the word "history" as an insult.
But what puzzles me is: why is Rifkin running well-funded foundations and talking to CEO's, while other people with similar ideas are writing obscure books or living on the fringes of the internet? It might be a simple as this: he has connections and feels comfortable among the powerful, while I have connections and feel comfortable on the fringe; and the ideas that we're channeling are coming out all over, because they're needed. (I'm talking about cultural and philosophical ideas. Rifkin's support for hydrogen energy is a blunder.)
It's also interesting that he predicted "a leap of consciousness by an entire generation" within the 1990's. Ha. I think our consciousness is changing, but it's even slower and more subtle than the collapse. Hardly anyone who lives through it will notice it, but in 500 years they will look back and see it clearly.
February 20. John Robb posts on rage against the machine. I've been thinking the same thing: that guy who flew a plane into the IRS building, and that professor who shot people when she was denied tenure, are symptoms of the decline of America. We've all been raised with the belief that if we work hard and play by the rules, we will get high-status jobs that pay a lot of money. But for someone to have high status, many others have to have low status, and money is meaningless without people so desperate for money that they will obey you if you give them some. As American power declines, there will be less and less money and status to go around, and tens of millions of people who were promised "success" will have it taken from them. And some of them will lash out.
I'm thinking that this kind of violence will be mostly done by people born between 1950 and 1975. Older people have already enjoyed their golden age, and younger people have no illusions that they're going to get one. But even people who are not angry at the system will still be going through pain and lashing out at whoever is nearby.
February 19. Now, back to regular blogging. This is the greatest Onion article ever: U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion.
On a related subject, an interview with Jeremy Rifkin on the third industrial revolution. I'm not exactly sure who this guy is. He's not a doomer and seems pretty close to the centers of power, but he's talking about a global culture based on empathy, and the end of the top-down economy.
Finally, from a couple weeks ago, a mind-blowing reddit comment on mythical oil:
In the future, even if there isn't a collapse, there will be no crude oil from the ground. Records will exist of it, but future people will have no material example of the substance our society runs on. Crude oil might be seen as a mythical, magical substance, something made up.
Corollary: what non-renewable resources might precursor civilizations have used up that we'll never know about? What "mythical" materials actually existed but don't anymore?
February 19. Thanks Shawn for starting a ranprieur subreddit! To participate, you will first have to make a reddit account, which is easy. Also, reddit is a great source for news and ideas, but only if you make careful use of the subreddit system. Here's the reddit FAQ. I have rewritten the communities page to include this information.
February 18. Thanks everyone who has emailed suggestions about the forums. I've read several from people who have stopped going there, one from someone whose only complaint is that not enough people go there, and one with an interesting suggestion to start a subreddit. The most perceptive email was from Nick:
I sense in your writing that you have lost your inspiration to write and to be public... that you are feeling almost burdened by this inertia you have as a blogger and virtual leader and philosopher. So many people turn to you for your ideas, your advice, etc. At this point, it seems to me that your heart is not in it. If that's true, you should consider moving on.
That's close. I really do still enjoy casual blogging and I expect to continue as long as the internet is up. But on the subjects of the critique of, collapse of, and escape from civilization as we know it, I've already said almost everything that I'll ever have to say. More and more of what I write on those subjects is just a rehash of stuff I wrote years ago. People email me with questions that they could find answered in the essays and archives, or send me links without checking to see if I've already posted them. More and more of the work I do is not to satisfy people's need for clear thinking and fresh perspectives, but their need for community. I understand that we live in a lonely culture. But community is 1) not something I specialize in, 2) not something you should seek in a social structure centered around one individual, and 3) not a need you should satisfy on the internet, although the internet is a valuable tool to locate people for face-to-face communities.
As for the forums, there's only one solution that doesn't increase my workload or make any enemies, and I've done it. I've retitled the "forums" link on this page to "communities", and instead of going straight to the Yuku.com board, it now goes to this intermediate page, which makes it clear that I would prefer to take no responsibility for any community based on my writing -- although I remain burdened with administrator power over the Yuku board, so if you want to become a moderator, I'll have to figure out how to do that for you. Several people have suggested ways that I could start better forums. If anyone is really that interested, please start it yourself! And I will happily link to it.
February 17. So I've heard that the forums are getting worse. I haven't looked at them myself in months -- it's just too stressful for me to go there. It's like being the rat who hits a lever and sometimes gets food and sometimes gets an electric shock. I even dread the orange envelope on Reddit, but it's worse when I'm the center of attention.
In hindsight, I should have explicitly kept my distance from the forums from the very beginning. So what do I do now? It is not an option for me to spend several hours a day being a careful and conscientious moderator, resolving conflicts by therapy and community-building instead of by banning. I just don't have nearly that much time or energy. Here are some options:
1) Find some sucker who will commit to doing the extremely difficult job of making the forums a nice place in a nice way. But I think anyone with those skills and that much time could find a better way to use them.
2) Go in there myself with an iron fist, just banning and deleting anything I don't like. But I'd rather not make enemies or have a reputation as that kind of person. Also, banning and deleting are forms of attention, and therefore they are incentives for people seeking attention to continue the same behavior, so I could get sucked into an endless game of whack-a-mole.
3) Completely disown the forums and remove the link from this page.
4) Start a new forum site, with membership by invitation only. And then in a few years, when that one inevitably goes bad, start another, and so on.
5) Continue to ignore the whole issue.